Sales channels are never an easily tamed beast--they're complex, involve
numerous people, and bring technology together with traditional efforts.
That sounded like an excellent challenge for Paula Tompkins, founder and
CEO of San Francisco-based ChannelNet.
How did ChannelNet get started?
During my early career selling complex products and services for 3M and
General Electric, I was struck with an idea. Why doesn't someone apply
the emerging personal computer technology to creating an innovative new
selling medium? Combining my field sales background with my
participation in the birth of the PC in Silicon Valley, I decided to
meet the challenge by starting ChannelNet.
What got you personally interested in doing this work?
At that time the personal computer had limited functionality. Most
people used it as a word processor, a few daring individuals used simple
flat file database programs to organize their customer mailing lists,
and the "killer app" of the day calculated numbers within an electronic
spreadsheet.
Being sales- and marketing-minded, I envisioned the PC as a tool for
delivering information and reducing the complex interactions involved in
conventional selling processes. I was sure this new technology could
help shorten the sales cycle by streamlining a customer's
decision-making and buying process. I conducted research to see if
anyone else was thinking along the same lines and/or creating software
for this purpose. When nobody appeared on the radar screen, I made the
leap and formed ChannelNet.
Why do you feel there's a need for what you provide?
Our company was an anomaly during the dotcom heyday when e-commerce was
promoted as the biggest revolution in the world of business. Pundits
predicted that the Web would eliminate the "brick-and-mortar" buying
experience. However, we always believed that a company's traditional
sales channels would continue to play a significant role in the buying
and selling of complex products and services. We viewed the Internet as
complement to, not a replacement for, existing sales channels.
What makes your company unique?
The majority of companies looking to build multichannel solutions don't
buy technology solutions. Instead they have their ad agency or their
consulting firm or their own internal IT department custom code the
solution. A custom coded solution is expensive, requires a long
development cycle--a significant solution could typically take nine
months to two years in development--and has extremely high maintenance
costs. As a result, our biggest challenge is to educate prospects that
there is a software product called ChannelNet SiteBuilder that can help
them reduce the costs and amount of maintenance, improve the
productivity, and gain speed to market compared to what building
multichannel solutions usually require.
Where do you want to build the company from here?
Our primary goal over the next 24 months is to continue to build and
broaden our relationship with our existing customers. We are not a
classic software product company. A typical software product company
hands off the complexity of system integration, end user education and
other essential elements of the program to consultants or internal IT
departments right after the deal is closed. The client ends up spending
many years and many millions of dollars, but is left with an unusable
solution. We have a different mode of operation. We work with our
clients to rapidly deliver an effective turnkey solution, and then build
and expand our working relationship over time to advance their
multichannel offerings.
do you know a Bay Area company we should cover? Let us know about it.
Send your local profile candidates to dan@computeruser.com.
